Laurels Are Poison

Chapter 3

CLINICAL THERMOMETER

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Deborah enjoyed her dinner. Neither the College nor her companion’s real business there was mentioned until she herself broached both subjects on the way home.

‘Oh, dear!’ she said. ‘I forgot to get the time-table of my lectures from the Assistant-Principal. Do you suppose I shall have to begin tomorrow?’

‘I know you will not,’ replied Mrs Bradley. ‘Tomorrow the rest of the children arrive and are to be received by their various tutors. Apart from that, nothing unpleasant is contemplated. I myself am to lecture during the term, but how, when, where, to whom and on what I have not the faintest idea.’

Deborah giggled.

‘I suppose you do lecture, though, sometimes, don’t you?’ she inquired. ‘To the outside world, I mean.’

‘Yes, child.’ Mrs Bradley turned back again to look at the moonlight over the moor. Deborah stared out of her own window for a minute or two; but she was, without being fully conscious of the fact, not very anxious to return to the College. By night the fact of Miss Murchan’s disappearance took on a deeper, more sinister significance than by day. It reminded her of her childhood attitude to ghost-stories.

‘I would like to know,’ she said, speaking very quietly in case Mrs Bradley did not want George (who was, however, separated from them by a glass screen against which his sturdy back looked powerfully reassuring) to hear what she was saying, ‘a bit more about Miss Murchan’s actual disappearance. You said it was at a College end-of-term dance.’

‘Yes; an extraordinary time to choose; and the facts of the disappearance, so far as I have been able to obtain them, do seem a little curious. Have you a mental picture of the situation of the College?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Well, on the night of the College Dance, Miss Murchan was most certainly present up to the Twilight Waltz.’

‘Twilight Waltz?’ said Deborah, amused.

‘That is what they call it. It seems to be an institution here, and comes almost at the end of the programme. The students are permitted to invite men friends to this one party of the year, and the College Hall was crowded. Now, the senior student of last year at Athelstan — not the girl we have seen today, but her predecessor in office — seems to have thought it incumbent upon her to dance with the Warden at least once during the evening, and the Warden, who appears to have been slightly obtuse, selected this particular dance, although the senior student’s young man had already initialled it on the student’s programme.’

‘And then Miss Murchan disappeared?’

‘Well, when the dance ended and the lights were turned up, Miss Murchan discovered that her back hair was coming down. As a matter of fact, the student herself remarked on it. Her story was that the Warden’s hair was hanging down and looked very untidy and, to quote the student’s exact words, “a bit Bacchanalian,” and that she told the Warden of it, but not in those exact words, and that Miss Murchan then said : “Yes, I thought I felt someone grasp my hair during the dance. The lights were very low; I must have been mistaken for someone else. There is always horse-play during this dance. I should have sat it out.”

‘Upon this she excused herself to the student, and went away to tidy herself up. She has not been seen again by any of her friends, or by anyone at the College.’

‘That certainly does seem odd. I suppose there is no chance that she committed suicide?’

‘If so, where is the body?’

‘Yes, where is the body?’ Deborah repeated. ‘But you would have to ask the same question if you thought she had been murdered, wouldn’t you? Oh, but, of course, the murderer would remove it’

They were silent after that, until they reached the College grounds, which they did at five minutes to eleven. The Halls were in total darkness, and Deborah, stepping out of the car and into the moonlight, felt a chill which was not altogether that of the night air as George drove off towards the garages, which were behind the main College building. Against her inclinations, she found herself filled full of uncomfortable fears engendered by the implications of the conversation she had just concluded.

She followed her companion across the lawn and up the flight of steps between the rockeries. She waited whilst Mrs Bradley produced a latch-key and opened the front door.

‘You go and make sure our three little birds are safely in their nests,’ said Mrs Bradley, switching on the lights. ‘I think we can trust that the senior student has already retired to rest, and time alone will show how far we can trust the servants about bedtimes and everything else.’

Deborah hesitated — and then began to mount the stairs. Mrs Bradley waited in the entrance hall, and then, when she saw the landing light switched on, she herself unlocked the door to the basement and servants’ quarters and explored below before she followed her. The study-bedrooms occupied by the three new students were on the second floor, the bedrooms of the Warden and Sub-Warden at opposite ends of the first floor. It had occurred to Mrs Bradley, upon her very first inspection of the premises, that a remarkable field for Hide-and-Seek, whether of an innocent or a criminal nature, existed in a house built on the plan which had been adopted in constructing each of the Halls at Cartaret. The two staircases were replicas one of the other, and were called the ‘back’ and the ‘front’ staircase, respectively, merely for reasons of convenience in nomenclatuse. Actually they were exactly alike, apart from the fact that the ‘front’ staircase began opposite the Warden’s sitting-room and the ‘back’ staircase mounted from outside the Students’ Common-Room. What was called the entrance hall was nothing more than a fairly wide passage which went from side to side of the house.

There was also the basement floor where the servants lived. This, too, had its corridor, the most extraordinary feature of which was that it was carried, by a covered way, completely through all five of the College Halls, beginning, in fact, in the bakehouse, which was used only twice a week to bake bread and pastry for the whole College, and then traversing in turn Athelstan, Edmund, Beowulf, Bede and Columba. Beyond Columba lay the Infirmary, and the corridor led to that, too, so that it was possible to convey a sick student all the way from Athelstan to the Infirmary without once emerging into the open air, or having to go up and down steps except from the one bedroom to the other.

‘Amazing,’ Mrs Bradley had observed, when the Principal, who had led her on a personally-conducted tour, pointed out the supreme advantages which this method of joining up the various Halls must confer upon Wardens and students. ‘And the same key, I suppose, fits all the doors?’

‘Yes, naturally,’ the Principal had replied. Then Mrs Bradley’s obvious lack of enthusiasm caused her to add with some haste: ‘But, of course, whatever has happened to poor Miss Murchan could not possibly have happened to her here.’

To this illogical remark Mrs Bradley had made no reply. As she followed Deborah up the front staircase she was thinking about it, however, and, perhaps for this reason, was sufficiently on the alert to make an irritating but interesting discovery.

Her bedroom doorway was in a small recess. Across this recess, in a business-like manner, a thick piece of string had been stretched. Two U-shaped staples had been driven, the one into a landing cupboard, the other into a wooden partition which formed the bathroom wall, and the string was stretched tightly between them about eight inches from the ground. Anyone going into the room would most likely have failed to see it in time, for it had been painted white to, match the bedroom door, and, as a piece of white drugget had been used as a slip-mat, the effect, concluded Mrs Bradley, studying the booby-trap thoughtfully, was that of complete camouflage.

Leaving the string exactly where it was, she stepped along the landing to Deborah’s door, to find that the artist, whoever she was, had exactly repeated her effects. She waited there until Deborah came down from the floor above.

‘All serene, although not, I am sorry to say, asleep,’ Deborah remarked. ‘In fact, the little blighters have been smoking. Is it allowed, do you think?’

‘It will be,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I must put up a notice about it. Look, child. The “little blighters” appear to have been doing something other than smoking.’

Deborah looked at the contraption. Then she knelt down and looked at it again. Mrs Bradley noted, approvingly, that she did not attempt to touch it.

‘Those three didn’t do this,’ she said, rising from her knees. Mrs Bradley looked at her with interest and with even more marked approval.

‘Are you sure, child?’

‘Well, Laura and Kitty — I mean Miss Menzies and Miss Trevelyan — aren’t the sort to think a hobbledehoy trick like this a bit funny, and I can’t see the senior student doing it.’

‘No. Remains the fair Alice,’ said Mrs Bradley complacently.

‘Or the servants — who may not like us.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Mrs Bradley, grinning. ‘Come on; let’s go up and bully the witnesses.’

‘If any,’ said Deborah, following her up the stairs. ‘By the way,’ she added, as they reached the next landing, ‘I do hope we shall remember those beastly strings, and not go tripping over them when we come down again.’

‘I shall remember mine, but I think I’ll untie yours,’ said Mrs Bradley, going down again. The driving-in of the staples, she was particularly interested to notice, had splintered the soft wood, but the splintering had been rendered almost unnoticeable by the application of more of the white paint. Nevertheless (and she had a keen sense of smell) not the slightest odour of paint could be detected.

‘Hm!’ said Mrs Bradley, switching off her powerful torch and rising from her knees. ‘Very painstaking.’

She went up on to the next floor when she had detached Deborah’s string, to find the Sub-Warden seated on Alice’s hat-box and Alice looking scared and uncomfortable.